The "Yulia" Mine, belonging to the Siberian Copper Joint-Stock Company (formerly the English Yenissei Copper Co., Ltd.), is located 90 versts in a straight line to the northwest of the district town of Minusinsk, in a mountainous area, at an altitude of about 3,000 to 3,500 feet above sea level. The topography of the area consists of a series of individual, rather high hills with relatively gentle slopes. "Yulia" lies almost on the border between the steppe (to the north) and the taiga (to the south). As a general rule, the northern slopes of the hills are covered with dense thickets of larch and birch, while the southern slopes are either bare or have only a grassy cover. The environs of "Yulia" are composed mainly of crystalline, often siliceous, highly metamorphosed limestones with severely disturbed stratification. In many places, the limestones are intruded through and cut by a whole system of individual massifs and dikes of igneous rocks — red-colored syenite porphyries and syenites.

In the spring and summer of 1910, on behalf of the Syr-Darya Mining Society, I was commissioned to examine the applications and allotments leased by the said company from P.S. Nazarov and located north of the city of Khodzhent within the Khodzhent district. Most of the claims and allotments lie in the foothills of Kara-Mazar ("Black Grave"), the most southwestern spur of the Ala-Tau ridges. Two allotments are located in the northwestern foothills of Mogol-Tau, a separate massif rising on the right bank of the Syr-Darya River, southwest of the Kara-Mazar mountains.